Meretites and Kahai, Pyramid Age Love Story

Pyramid Age love story comes to life in Egyptian tomb's vivid color

Owen Jarus LiveScience   
Nov. 15, 2013 at 6:36 PM ET

 

She was a priestess named Meretites, and he was a singer named Kahai, who performed at the pharaoh's palace. They lived about 4,400 years ago in an age when pyramids were being built in Egypt, and their love is reflected in a highly unusual scene in their tomb — an image that has now been published in all its surviving color.
The tomb at Saqqara — which held this couple, their children and possibly their grandchildren — has now been studied and described by researchers at Macquarie University's Australian Center for Egyptology. Among the scenes depicted is a relief painting showing the couple gazing into each other's eyes, with Meretites placing her right hand over Kahai's right shoulder.

Such a display of affection was extraordinary for Egypt during the Pyramid Age. Only a few examples of a face-to-face embrace survive from the Old Kingdom (2649 B.C. to 2150 B.C.), the time period when the couple lived and pyramid building thrived, said Miral Lashien, a researcher at Macquarie University. "I think that this indicates very special closeness," Lashien told LiveScience in an email.

This scene, along with other works of art recorded in the tomb, suggest that women in Pyramid Age Egypt enjoyed a greater level of equality than some scholars believe. "The tomb of Kahai is an example of the importance of women," wrote Lashien in the email. "The frequency of their representations and the equal size to their husbands or brothers suggest equal status." [We already knew that.]

Photo by Ms. Effy Alexakis, (c) Macquarie University Ancient Cultures Research
Center.  Inside a tomb dating back to the age of the Pyramids in Egypt was this image,
an embrace between a priestess and her husband, a singer in the pharaoh's palace. The
image has been  recorded by researchers in full color.

In the scene, Kahai is wearing a wig, a collar over his shoulders, kilt, bracelets and leopard's skin. He also is holding a staff and scepter, which serve as symbols of authority and responsibility probably related to his rise to the position of singing director, Lashien said. Meretites' wardrobe includes a long wig, choker and broad collar, bracelets and a long, tight dress with shoulder straps that appear to leave a breast exposed. (The display of bare breasts was not unusual among ancient Egyptian women.) [Don't you love how long Meretites' arm is -- look where her fingers are resting on Kahai's shoulder and compare the length of her arm versus his, LOL!]
This kind of embrace was not limited to romantic love; one of the few other similar embraces known from Pyramid Age Egypt shows two men who were likely twin brothers, Lashien noted.

Pyramid Age ColorThe tomb itself was discovered in 1966 and published in a book in 1971 mainly in black-and-white images. Scientists returned to the tomb in January and February of 2010 to study and document its artwork in full color. "This tomb is one of the most colourful examples of Old Kingdom art and certainly deserves a full-color publication," Lashien writes in her recently published book, "The Chapel of Kahai and his Family" (The Australian Center for Egyptology: Reports 33, 2013).
When the tomb was discovered in 1966, mummified remains were found in it, but it is not certain if they belonged to the family members. Egyptians in later periods often reused the tombs of those who had lived before them.

Archaeological and artistic evidence indicates the tomb was built during or shortly after the rule of King Niuserre (2420 B.C. - 2389 B.C.), who constructed his own pyramid just to the southeast of the Giza pyramids at a site now referred to as Abusir.

A family of singersKahai and his sons bear titles that indicate they worked as singers, with Kahai becoming the "overseer of singers of the two houses." That title meant "the family was employed in the palace," Lashien said in the email. "Probably, as a result, their tomb is particularly beautiful, being perhaps decorated by the royal artists," she said.

Indeed, the tomb art includes a colorful scene showing two people singing and musicians playing harps and flutes. Whether the musicians shown are family members or other individuals is unknown.
Despite his lofty title, Kahai would probably have kept on singing in addition to performing administrative duties, Lashien said. Looking at representations of musicians from the time period in which they lived, she said, "We have no evidence of large music/singing groups which required a full-time director. The representations show small groups of two to five men and/or women playing string and wind instruments, with one or two singers."

While the tomb itself doesn't reveal the specific songs Kahai sang for the pharaoh's family, the subject matter would, at least in some cases, have been cheerful. From other inscriptions, researchers know, for example, that the songs speak of the "pleasures of life, not different from today," Lashien said in the email, noting that one song encourages people to "eat, drink and be merry."

This is a snip of one of the images on the right side of the photo
of Kahai's and Meretites' tomb.  They are both sitting before
their respective game boards, oh sorry, they are "offering tables"
according to the archaeologists and the playing pieces are not
playing pieces at all but loafs of bread.  Yeah, right.

A father burying his adult sonThough Kahai was apparently successful at his job, his life was not devoid of tragedy. When the team studied the tomb's inscriptions they discovered that Kahai had to bury one of his adult sons, named Nefer. The tomb decorations include depictions of the young children whom Nefer left behind, and an inscription suggests that Nefer's wife was pregnant at the time of his death.

But even when family members died, their survivors could take comfort in the belief that the tomb provided them with a way to keep in some form of contact. The tomb includes five "false doors" with images of the deceased that acted as a conduit of sorts between the world of the living and that of the dead.

"Food was placed in front of the false door, and the Ka (life force) of the deceased was able to come out through the false door to receive the offerings and to enjoy the day," Lashien said.

Egyptian Treasures on Display

From Columbus Local News Art museum takes wraps off ancient Egyptian 'treasures' * Demetrios the mummy highlights the collection of artifacts on display at the Columbus Museum of Art this weekend through June 7. By EILEEN RYAN Published: Monday, February 9, 2009 9:17 AM EST (Image from Columbus Museum of Art Exhibition Gallery: Queen Neferu having her hair done) Ancient Egyptians who sought to defeat death by surrounding themselves with objects to protect them in the next world could hardly have imagined what form their immortality would take in this one. They'll live on at the Columbus Museum of Art's exhibit "To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum," which opens Saturday, Feb. 14. The exhibition includes objects that range in date from 3500 B.C. to A.D. 100. It includes stone and wood sarcophagi, amulets, stone sculpture and statues, canopic jars that were used to store the body's major organs, two dog mummies and a human mummy named Demetrios. Along with his mummy is a portrait of Demetrios, allowing visitors to see how he looked when he was alive. "It's really quite impressive to have this mummy who's named," said Dominique Vasseur, the museum's curator of European art. Preservation of names was important, as well as preservation of bodies, because of the spells that protected ancient Egyptians in the afterlife, he said. "Your name was important, and the fact that we know the names of these particular coffins -- there is the idea that they are alive, at least in our minds." The exhibition "is really about the afterlife and the tomb and the procedures and processes an Egyptian would go through to guarantee life in the afterlife," Vasseur said. "To Live Forever" is divided into four sections that will show visitors Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife, including papyrus fragments of the Book of the Dead; the mummy; the tomb and the objects that were placed in it; and how those objects would have differed from the tomb of a wealthy Egyptian to that of a one who wasn't wealthy. The painted wooden sarcophagi may be the most fascinating items in the exhibit, Vasseur said, "just in their scale and in all the visual information that is painted on them." Children, especially, are going to be amazed by the mummy itself, he said. "It's not too often you actually have a person and you know they're in there." "To Live Forever" gives Central Ohio residents a rare opportunity to experience such a fine collection of Egyptian art, Vasseur said. "Egyptian culture fascinates us because, in one respect, it seems so understandable," Vasseur said, though it is essentially an extinct culture. "It had a formative nature on subsequent cultures. A lot of underpinnings of our own world and belief system came out of Egypt." Residents can fuel their undying fascination with ancient Egypt until the exhibit closes June 7. Admission to the exhibit is $10 for adults; $8 for seniors 60 and older and students 18 and older; $5 for children ages 6-17; and free for museum members and children 5 and younger. For more information, call 614-221-4848 or visit the Web site columbusmuseum.org.

The Magic of Color in Ancient Egypt

From the Discovery Channel: 'Green Magic' Protected Egyptian Child Mummies Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Image: Raffaella Bianucci Protection for the Afterlife A bright green stone found inside a fossilized leather bag buried with an Egyptian toddler. The green stone likely had great magical significance for the ancient Egyptians. Discovery News Video Feb. 5, 2009 -- A rare mummified child from the early period of Egyptian history was discovered buried with a bright green amulet stone once believed to hold magical powers, according to a new study. The finds help to explain why hieroglyphics and historical texts record that Egyptian children wore green eye makeup. It also adds to the growing body of evidence that ancient Egyptians thought color itself held sacred energy that could help or hurt individuals. Lead author Raffaella Bianucci explained that the first Egyptian colored amulets occurred as early as the predynastic Badarian period, from 4500 to 3800 B.C. The recently analyzed child mummy, containing the remains of a 15- to 18-month-old toddler, dates to 4,700 years ago. "Even in limited forms and materials, these earliest amulets give a good indication of the dangerous forces that the early Egyptians felt were present in their world and needed to be harnessed by magical means," said Bianucci, a scientist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at Via Accademia Albertina in Turin, Italy. She and her colleagues first examined the child's remains, which were wrapped in linen bandages. Immunological evidence determined that the youngster died from an acute malarial infection. The researchers then turned their attention to a fossilized leather bag tied with linen twine, which was wrapped in the bandages with the mummy. Two stones were found within the bag. The researchers focused on a bright green one, found poking through the fossilized leather. Powerful X-rays, as well as scanning electron microscope analysis, revealed that the stone was chrysocolla, or hydrated copper silica, according to the paper that will be published in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. To this day, chrysocolla is valued as an ornamental stone that, in its bluer forms, is sometimes confused with turquoise. Bianucci said malachite was a more common green mineral in early Egypt, since chrysocolla ores were limited to very few in the Sinai and the Eastern Egyptian Desert. Chrysocolla may have been special for children, as archaeologists previously unearthed a small figure of a child made of the green material in another grave. "In ancient Egypt, color was an integral part of the substance and being of everything in life," she said, explaining that green -- the color of new vegetation and growing crops, including the treasured papyrus plant -- was linked to health and "flourishing." Chapter 30 of the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text, instructs that a scarab beetle amulet be made of green minerals and placed at the heart of mummies. Bianucci continued that, based on such records, red was the color of life and victory, white suggested omnipotence and purity, black was a symbol of death and the night, blue symbolized life and rebirth and yellow was thought to be eternal and indestructible, like the sun and gold. In terms of the child mummy's green amulet, she said, "We can hypothesize that (the parents) wished their child to be protected from unwanted influence and to be healthy in its afterlife." Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told Discovery News that "the study was very well executed" and "is just what we need to shed light on the cultural practices and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians." "The fact that the child was buried with a chrysocolla bead is very interesting as it is rare to have such an identification," Ikram added. "Clearly this was an amulet that was interred with the child in an effort to ensure its safety in the afterworld -- a pity it did not protect the infant in this one."

Paintings from the Lost Tomb of Nebamun

How grateful I am that any of these magnificent tomb paintings have survived since c. 1500 BCE, and how sad I am that antiquities robbers destroyed so much of their beauty for money. Irreplaceable heritage and history destroyed forever and hacked out of the 'living rock' of our memories for a few lousy bucks. A pox and a curse on the houses of those people who dealt in and continue to deal in such iniquity! I am really GLAD the man who destroyed Nebamun's tomb died on the streets of London a pauper. Photo: Nebamun, his wife and daughter on board a skiff, during a hunting trip. For colours, the unknown 'Michelangelo of the Nile' would have used soot, desert stones and ground glass Photograph: Corbis (Notice the cat, sort of "floating" at the knees of Nebamun, helping herself to the plethora of birds! Cats - invariably female - were Egyptian symbols for female sexuality and the recreative force, embodied in such goddesses as Bast (Bastet) and the powerful and ancient lioness-headed Sekhmet (Sakhmet), an aspect of equally ancient goddess Hathor (Het-hert), often depicted as a cow-headed woman. In later depictions, Hathor was depicted as a woman sporting long cow horns with the Sun resting in-between, and often confused with renditions of Isis.) Raiders of the lost art They are ancient Egypt's greatest tomb paintings, yet they were created for a middle-ranking official by an unknown artist. As the Nebamun panels go on display in the British Museum, Robin McKie reveals a tale of exquisite craftsmanship and a 3,500-year-old tabby cat Robin McKie The Observer, Sunday 4 January 2009 Enter the British Museum's new Egyptian gallery and you will be struck by a line of painted panels of unexpectedly rich colouring and extravagant composition. On one panel, a pair of naked female dancers, their fingers interlaced, glide sinuously before a crowd at a banquet. Beside them, a flute player stares out from the painting, her hair shimmering as if she is swaying to the music. Each figure is distinct, individual and freely drawn, their proportions and detail captured perfectly. Wander further along the main wall and you will find other exuberant depictions of everyday life in 18th Dynasty Egypt: a boy driving cattle along a road; geese, stored in baskets, ready for the market; a farmer, stooped and balding, checking his fields, and a hunt through reed beds that burst with creatures - shrike, wagtails and pintail ducks - easily identifiable still. These are the tomb paintings that once belonged to Nebamun, a court official who lived almost 3,500 years ago, and they are the greatest surviving paintings we have from ancient Egypt. Each was created for Nebamun by a painter as gifted as any of the Renaissance's finest artists, and they will be revealed to the public this month when the British Museum opens a special gallery dedicated to them, a 10-year project that has cost £1.5m to complete. It will be a striking addition to the museum. Yet for all the effort that has gone into the gallery's construction and the studies of its paintings, mystery still shrouds the Nebamun panels. For a start, archaeologists have no idea about the identity of the artist who created them and are equally puzzled why a painter of such talent was involved with a relatively minor clerk like Nebamun. Nor do historians have any record of the original tomb's location. The man who discovered them was a Greek grave robber called Giovanni d'Athanasi, who dug them up in Thebes, as Luxor was then known, and then passed them on, via a collector, to the British Museum. However, in 1835 D'Athanasi fell out with curators over his finder's fee and refused to divulge the precise position of the tomb. He took his secret to the grave, dying a pauper in 1854 in Howland Street, a few minutes' walk from the museum. Ever since, archaeologists have searched in vain for the tomb of Nebamun and any treasures that it may still contain. The Nebamun paintings have - to say the least - a colourful history, and the task of unravelling it, and for caring for these remarkable works, has been handled by Egyptologist Richard Parkinson. Dapper, bow-tied and possessed of an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, Parkinson showed me the panels last November, when they were cased in wood and glass, ready for removal to their new gallery. They were stacked in a museum basement store which held other Egyptian artefacts, including a series of panels dedicated to a chief treasurer, Sobekhotep. Think of him as the 18th Dynasty's answer to Alistair Darling, a politician who controlled the nation's wealth and economic destiny. Yet the panels commemorating him are thin, lifeless and provide little feeling for the man's life or times, or any sense of artistic sensitivity. By contrast, the artwork that celebrates Nebamun's life bursts with energy. In one panel, he stands on a papyrus skiff at the head of a hunting trip into reed-covered marshes filled with tilapia and puffer fish, Egyptian red geese, tiger butterflies, black and white wagtails and an exquisitely painted tawny cat that is helping itself to the birds being brought down by Nebamun. The cat is a product of particularly grand draughtsmanship, in which stripes and dots have been delicately assembled to produce a magnificently whiskered tabby. Scales on fish, feathers on ducks and soft folds in the clothes of the Nebamun retinue have also been created this way. It is an extraordinary evocation of Egyptian life, its vitality undimmed 3,500 years later. As for Nebamun, in the hunting panel he towers over proceedings, his wife Hatshepsut beside him and their daughter at his feet. Wearing a black wig and a great collar of beads, he strikes a pose that is assured and proud, almost regal. Yet Nebamun was really just a bean counter - or to be precise, a grain counter whose job was to make sure the wheat stores in the temple of Amun were properly controlled. So how did this middle-grade civil servant acquire the services of one of the greatest painters of ancient Egypt while his superiors had to make do with second-rate artists? "These are the greatest paintings we have from ancient Egypt," Parkinson says. "There is nothing to touch them in any museum in the world. Yet they were created for an official too lowly to have been known by the pharaoh. It is quite extraordinary." Parkinson does, however, have an intriguing explanation. The "Michelangelo of the Nile" who created these great tomb panels was almost certainly working on another project in the neighbourhood of Nebamun's tomb at the time. This building or burial complex would have been constructed, and decorated, on a far grander style for a far more important figure. Nebamun merely slipped the artist and his team some extra cash and they stole off to paint his own panels. In short, the secret of his tomb and its great painting lies with one word: backhanders. "Life then was not that different from today," says Parkinson. Ironically, the artist's main project was no doubt a finer work, but it has disappeared, looted and trashed like the vast majority of ancient Egypt's great treasures. The Nebamun panels are the only record we have of this genius. We have therefore good reason to be grateful to Nebamun, one of life's perennial opportunists, but an astute collector of fine art just the same. As to their purpose, the paintings were intended to make Nebamun appear important in the afterlife. They would have covered the tomb's upper level, while his body was interred in a chamber below ground. Friends and family would have visited the upper part of the tomb, left gifts and held feasts to commemorate Nebamun's life. "This was where life and death merged," says Parkinson. Thus the paintings were not buried and hidden away but established a link between the living and the dead. Hence their importance to Nebamun's family. They were to be appreciated, leisurely, after the man's death as reminders of his achievements. They were certainly not created at a leisurely rate, however, as Parkinson has found in his investigations of the paintings. Once the tomb's stone walls had been erected, they were covered in straw and Nile mud mixed together into a squishy paste. Then, when this was dry, a thin layer of white plaster was added. As that started to dry, the artist and his team began to paint, using soot from cooking pots, desert stones for red, yellow and white pigments, and ground glass for blue and green. Rushes, chewed at the end, would have acted as brushes. Squashed into the dark, narrow upper tomb, the painters would have had to work by lamplight before the plaster dried. The results are almost impressionistic in the freedom of their execution. "I think Nebamun had all his paintings done for his tomb-chapel walls in three months," says Parkinson. "Yet the draughtsmanship was quite wonderful. The thing is that although the artist and his team may have done them in a few weeks, I have now spent a quarter of my life studying their handiwork." The panels' importance to modern eyes is clear. They tell us a great deal about ancient Egypt and its everyday activities, and about differences and similarities between life then and now. "The straw crates in which geese are sold at market - you see these on just about every street corner in Cairo," says Parkinson. "And the women's jet-black hair and skin colour are just the same as we see in Egypt today." However, Parkinson warns about drawing too many parallels between modern life and the scenes depicted in the panels. Objects and animals are often included because they had great symbolic importance. That great hunt scene is more than a depiction of everyday life: the birds and cat are symbols of fertility and female sexuality, and Nebamun's expedition can also be seen as "taking possession of the cycle of creations and rebirth", as one scholar has put it. Certainly, visitors should take care when trying to interpret the panels' meaning. Nevertheless, the paintings repay detailed inspection. On several of them, you can see where d'Athanasi's grave robbers had started to crowbar a panel from a wall only to find it cracking, ready to split. They would then move on to splinter open the panel at a new spot. "Only 20 per cent of the panels survived these attacks," adds Parkinson. "Only sections that would appeal to British audiences were taken: the ones with naked dancing girls and scenes from gardens. Perfect for our taste, in short." One or two other fragments did end up in other museums, including several that are now kept in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Evidence also suggests that a handful of fragments may survive elsewhere. For example, records from the Cairo Museum show that, just after the second world war, a few sections from the tomb were about to be exported from Egypt, a move that was opposed by its government - so officials had the panel pieces photographed and stored in the great vaults below the Cairo Museum. And that is where they rest today, though their precise location has been lost. All that is known is that among the tens of thousands of other ancient treasures kept in the museum's store, the missing Nebamun panels are today gathering dust in a dark, lost corner. It is a strange fate and it invites - irresistibly - a comparison with the fictional resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, dumped in a mammoth warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In short, a fantastic end for some fantastic art.